The controversy has reached such a pitch that the Vatican is hitting back directly at the New York Times. Cardinal William J. Levada, who succeeded the Pope as head of the Vatican’s doctrinal department, and is also American, posted a long (long) statement on the Vatican’s website. Alas, Levada appears to have lost faith….in America’s newspaper of record, for doing exactly what a newspaper is supposed to do: long, involved,
As I write this response today (March 26, 2010) I have had to admit to them that I am not proud of America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, as a paragon of fairness.I say this because today’s Times presents both a lengthy article by Laurie Goodstein, a senior columnist, headlined “Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest,” and an accompanying editorial entitled “The Pope and the Pedophilia Scandal,” in which the editors call the Goodstein article a disturbing report (emphasis in original) as a basis for their own charges against the Pope. Both the article and the editorial are deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness that Americans have every right and expectation to find in their major media reporting.
It goes on…and on. The point being twofold: The Times was irresponsible in the angle of their reporting (“the point of Goodstein’s article, however, is to attribute the failure to accomplish this dismissal to Pope Benedict”) and even though all this staggering abuse did happen they unfairly connect it with the Pope.
The NYT, for its part, says “its reports were “based on meticulous reporting and documents.”